Texas Torquemada

Unbelievable.

After years of international and domestic outrage, court decisions, and even bi-partisan Congressional condemnation, the Bush Administration continues to publicly and officially support torture. It's just that simple.

As the New York Times reports today:

Many of the harsh interrogation techniques repudiated by the Pentagon on Wednesday would be made lawful by legislation put forward the same day by the Bush administration. And the courts would be forbidden from intervening...

Indeed, the proposed legislation takes pains to try to ensure that the Supreme Court will not have a second bite at the apple. "The act makes clear," it says in its introductory findings, "that the Geneva Conventions are not a source of judicially enforceable individual rights"...

[Yale Law School Dean Harold Hongju Koh] said the administration's new interpretation of the Geneva Conventions would further isolate the United States from the rest of the world.

"Making U.S. ratification of Common Article 3 narrower and more conditional than everyone else's," he said, "by its very nature suggests that we are not prepared to make the same commitment that every other nation has made."

Good God, America, where is our collective outrage? Whatever euphemistic wording is trotted out by the White House in defense of its stance, whatever spin is applied to its appalling embrace of bestial behavior, whatever frenzied and inflated fears it tries to exploit as an excuse for the brutalization of America's "enemies" - subject, conveniently, to BushCo's secret, subjective definition of the term - the current Administration wants to legally establish torture as acceptable U.S. policy.

And that we cannot allow.

Now, I wasn't just born yesterday. It's common knowledge that whenever men with guns have been dispatched against other men with guns that are trying to kill them, there has been isolated mistreatment of "enemy combatants." And I'm sure that there are a number of specific instances in which that mistreatment has yielded pertinent information that saved lives.

Sadly, that's what happens when human beings sink to the "all else has failed" alternative of war. That's what happens when otherwise decent individuals are forced into a situation of unrelenting horror, destruction, and brutality.

That's why war should be avoided at all costs, except as an "all else has failed" course of action - and why those swaggering leaders who rush to war must be emphatically censured, rejected, and removed by any citizenry that dares to call itself "enlightened" or "democratic."

But vigorously advocating the torture of prisoners as an official national policy - and disingenuously doing so in the name of "freedom" - crosses over into a realm of depravity that is treasonous to the very ideals of America. The consistent stance of our President and his minions is a betrayal of the core values we habitually trumpet as setting the U.S. apart from its enemies.

At least the U.S. I remember.

Are we really ready to abandon those fundamental principles of basic human decency embraced by the free nations of the world, simply because we've become so irrationally frightened of a ginned-up "threat" which poses less statistical danger to each of us than stepping into our bathtubs? If your answer is "yes" then America truly has become a shameful place to call home - specifically because of you and others like you.

Congratulations. You're doing a heckuva job.

Just remember this. The next time President Bush waxes poetic about "supporting the troops" and "protecting America" with his "necessary tool" of "alternative interrogation," he's lying. To you. To me. To the entire population.

It should be more than obvious that his persistent campaign to dance around the Geneva Conventions places our troops on the ground in far greater danger, should they be captured in battle, by providing an abysmal blueprint of what this nation endorses as "acceptable" prisoner abuse.

It puts every American in jeopardy of attack, by inflaming already boiling hatred of U.S. arrogance and hypocrisy, and by stating, essentially, "rules are for sissies."

It isolates and weakens us as a credible player on the global stage, by defiantly dismissing time-honored codes of basic human decency, codes which we've been taught up 'til now separate the enlightened peoples of the world from barbarians who must be opposed and contained.

If there were one shred of evidence that torture has actually provided actionable intelligence which genuinely made the planet safer, then even I might be forced to concede its effectiveness, and the necessity of its employment. But as much as we're told that this is a vital tool in ensuring our security, I've yet to hear of a single incident in which that's been the case.

And you would think that this Administration in particular, it's arms already sore from congratulating itself for a long list of failures and fabrications, would have leaped by now at the chance to dazzle us all with a real success story.

So where are those proud tales of the valuable information gleaned at Abu Ghraib that saved the lives of our sons and daughters in Iraq? Or the evil plot foiled by essential intelligence from Guantanamo Bay? Or the international terrorist organization smashed thanks to the breaking of a terrorist leader in one of our secret prisons overseas?

How much more obvious does the truth have to be, America, for us to rise up as a unified voice, irregardless of political stripe, and demand an end to this cruel insanity?

Torture is torture. It's not "alternative interrogation." It's sadism masquerading as necessity. It violates international law, and betrays the very tenets of a country that has the temerity to call itself "Christian." It degrades us as a people, and shames us as a nation.

Those of you who agree with the position of our Torturer in Chief are simply not worth talking to. I can only hope that one day you're captured by a so-called "enemy combatant" and subject to the flip side of Mr. Bush's disdain for humanitarian treatment. As your head is being held underwater, or your genitals are being electrocuted, or you're being stripped and anally raped by your captors, I promise to half-heartedly pray that you'll be able to find some comfort in wordlessly repeating, "What's good for the goose is good for the gander, what's good for the goose..."

And for those of you who find Bush's proposed legislation as reprehensible as I do, I urge you to express your disgust as energetically and often as possible. To your Representative. To your Senator. And, perhaps most importantly, to the Texas Torquemada himself.

After all, it's only our national soul that's at stake.